Cintra Wilson is a former San Franciscan who, before she made her name as a columnist for
Salon.com
, was a veteran of the San Francisco and
Los Angeles theater
scenes. Her first book, "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Revelations," was a collection of her columns on our celebrity-obsessed culture. "Colors Insulting to Nature," Wilson's first novel, is also concerned with the quest for fame and celebrity, as evinced in the struggles of young Liza Normal to catch the brass ring.

We first meet Liza as a 13-year-old auditioning for a television commercial. The story follows Liza from Reno to Fairfax to San Francisco and Los Angeles, back to Fairfax and Nevada a dozen years later, where, wiser and having achieved some note in a manner she did not expect, she has finally learned Dorothy Gale's lesson that "There's no place like home."

Wilson has a journalist's eye for the telling detail and a talent for depicting types. That's a problem with the novel: Most of the supporting cast is caricatures, not characters. There's the stage mother from hell, the saintly grandmother, the ditzy New Age midwife-pot dealer and so on. Another problem is that Wilson doesn't trust her storytelling abilities: By Page 5, she's addressing the reader directly in the first of several coy, don't-take- this-narrative-too-serious asides, an affectation as annoying as an insufferable fifth-grader in the school play who keeps breaking character to smirk at her parents in the audience.

Fortunately, these asides become fewer as Wilson gets into her narrative and begins to let the story carry her. Her real gift is the remembrance of past humiliations, and her writing always becomes more gripping when Liza is in embarrassing situations. Wilson's description of high school cliques is dead-on, and when the drunken Liza is raped at a popular kids' party, to which she was invited only because of her one friend's drug-dealing connections, we are surprised to find ourselves caring about her.

After this incident, Liza becomes a punk in a Mohawk hair-do, finding the in-your-face attitude liberating. She also becomes a participant in San Francisco's campy gay theater scene, performing in such fare as "Beneath the Valley of Mommy Dearest." Wilson's affection for the demimonde transcends her satirical descriptions, such as how Liza's comparative normality makes her a standout. "Since Liza was the only organic female on the stage, the rare occasions in which a straight male drifted into the club (curiosity seekers and junkies darting in to use the rest room, usually), she looked, by comparison, to be the daintiest, smoothest-skinned young beauty in five states. The irony was not lost on Liza that the one venue in which she looked like a normal, cute, teen ingenue was a context in which men were transforming into women."

Through the theater, Liza meets ChoCho, a cocaine dealer who introduces her to the outskirts of B-list celebrities and attempts to serve as a coke- snorting Henry Higgins to her Miss Doolittle. The celebrity parties to which ChoCho takes the eager Liza have the ring of truth in their description. Liza is surprised to find the celebrities and their hangers-on fairly uninteresting, with their constant need to reassure each other that they are indeed the in- crowd: "None of them had substantial character; they all seemed to be adrift, flitting in the breeze, fickle and insecure, coddling themselves by burning money up their nose holes and talking frantically about themselves. But despite all that, Liza wanted to be one of them, because they were in the hip, young, famous, elbow-rubbing cadre, and she wasn't."

That last sentence is symptomatic of Wilson's own love-hate relationship with celebrity, an ambivalence that weakens her satire. Attacking a bunch of vacuous beautiful people is just the flip side of fawning over them; real disdain would be to ignore them as unworthy of notice.

A few years later, still not having found fame as a singer or actress, Liza has wandered to Haight-Ashbury, where she finds herself rooming with Greycoat, Faun and a group of other hippies in "Elf House." The setting gives Wilson the opportunity for wry descriptions and wicked put-downs. "Liza attended a party at Elf House with Lorna and found herself drawn in by getting a crush on Greycoat (all girls did, at first, until they realized that his elfin mystique was mainly used to expose an endless parade of giggling new Haight Street conquests to his version of 'Sex Magick')."

After burnout, drug rehabilitation and an abortive stint in Los Angeles, Liza finds herself a celebrated if pseudonymous author in a genre of literary porn called "Slash Fiction." She eventually turns her alter ego, Venal de Minus, into a phone sex phenomenon and Las Vegas stage act. The family is reunited, and Liza at last hooks up with the young man she has loved since her teens. It's a happily-ever-after ending, except that Wilson adds another of her asides to say that it isn't, really. That final aside has some real wisdom, however, and gives a strong ending to an entertaining tale.

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